


Port in the Storm

by mcschnuggles



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, CGRE - Caregiver/Age Regressor, Caregiver!Toko, Gen, Regressing!Byakuya, Temper Tantrums
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:14:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26241736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mcschnuggles/pseuds/mcschnuggles
Summary: Byakuya's "nephew" visits unexpectedly, and it's up to Toko to help quell the storm.Sequel to "Home Base," but can be read independently.
Relationships: Fukawa Touko & Togami Byakuya
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	Port in the Storm

Byakuya doesn’t call for Toko often.

Unless one of them is regressed, they tend to stay out of each other’s ways. After all, if they get along too well, someone might suspect something, so as much as Toko wants to spend every second with him, it’s better if they stay distant. Most people just think she’s gotten over her crush, and the relief keeps them from making any further inquiries.

They just leave her to her work, which is mainly just writing up press releases for the new Hope’s Peak Academy and copywriting an endless stream of tattered documents into a readable digital format. It’s mindless enough for the work not to bother her.

She’s nibbling on her chew necklace, in the middle of trying to deciper a half-torn file on instructor hires, when the door to her office creaks open.

“Toko.”

Toko turns to see Kyoko.

She looks like the conversation is painful for her, and Toko would probably make a snide remark about that if that wasn’t just how Kyoko’s face always was. The only person she ever seems happy talking to is Makoto.

“Byakuya was looking for you earlier. I believe he said something about a nephew visiting? He wanted me to pass the message along.”

“Wh-what?” Calling for her is one thing, but leaving a message with someone else? Unheard of. After all, that’s the kind of thing that leaves a trail, especially with someone who knows him well enough to doubt he’s that close with any of his nephews. Something’s wrong.

Toko jumps out of her seat, leaving without a goodbye or thanks. She hears Kyoko give a half-hearted call over her shoulder, but both of them know that she isn’t going to stop.

Thankfully, no one else tries to stop her. The halls are completely empty at this time of day, since most of the staff and administration are in their offices. Even if they were out and about, it’s not like anyone cares enough to ask why she’s in a hurry. Komaru, yes, and maybe her stupid brother if he’s feeling particularly do-goody, but no one else.

Byakuya’s private room stays sequestered on the far end of the main building, constructed to his specifications and designed to look as little like the student dorms as possible. Honestly, she has no idea why he didn’t just take it one step further and combine his office and his room; he works just as hard in both.

She pushes against the door, alarmed at how it yields under her touch. Byakuya never leaves his door unlocked.

A peek inside tells her the interior is in similar states. His bag sits abandoned on the floor, the papers inside half-spilling out. Considering Byakuya’s standards, it’s nothing short of a disaster zone.

“About time.” Byakuya scoffs. He paces to one end of his room in back again. Toko’s never seen his hands shake so badly.

She ignores the jab. “H-how’s your nephew?”

“Obviously not well!” he snaps. “Or are you really just that unobservant?”

She ignores that jab too and takes the time to close and lock the door behind her. For good measure, she pushes against the door, just to confirm that it’s locked—his ritual, not hers. “Did something happen?”

He barks a laugh, only serving to emphasize just how erratic he’s feeling. Toko has seen this in him a handful of times before, and she still has no idea what to do.

“ _Did something happen?_ ” he mocks. Toko’s stomach twists, not just because it’s unexpectedly cruel, but because Byakuya so firmly believes mockery is uncouth. “Do you intend to say anything of use or are you just content to spew frivolities out of your putrid mouth?”

Toko scowls, the anger bubbling up and threatening to spill over. Before they’d become each other’s support systems, she would’ve taken verbal abuse like that without complaint. But now that she knows Byakuya’s testing her, that he’s being intentionally cruel in the hopes that she pushes back, she’s more than willing to oblige. “Y-you don’t get to talk to me like th-that!”

Byakuya stops mid-step, drawing himself up to his full height. She hadn’t realized just how much he’d been slouching until he’s towering over her. “I’m sorry?” He’s not used to being spoken to like that. Not from his coworkers or friends, but least of all Toko.

“J-just because you’re upset doesn’t mean you get to take it out on me!” They’re more Komaru’s words than hers, but she’s shocked to find she actually means them.

He opens his arms, a desperate grin coming to his face. “Then hit me!”

So that’s what this is about.

A final gift from his father, sometimes the only thing that can snap Byakuya to his senses is a well-timed slap to the face.

Toko’s done it before—not because he’s pushed her like this before, but because she’d felt so bad. He’s like a junkie in need of a hit, and she’d rather give in than witness him be so pathetic.

But today is different. Usually when he asks to be slapped, he’s more anxious than aggressive. Babbling. Desperate. Lost in his own self-doubt. Toko doesn’t know a lot about people, especially without the lens of fiction as a buffer, but her gut instinct is telling her a slap would do more harm than good today.

“N-no.”

“No?” His face darkens, but it only makes him look like a child that’s been denied a toy. In any other situation, she might laugh. “Did you forget your backbone as well?”

Toko takes a deliberate step back. “N-no. Y-you’re just t-trying to provoke me.” She pauses, wracking her brain for an appropriate response. She’s written tons of single moms with bratty kids—with the market she writes for, that’s the kind of tropey shit that never gets old—so what would they say in this situation? “Y-you need to use your words. Your p- _polite_ words.”

Byakuya reels back as if she had actually slapped him. “Are you kidding? Do you think talking down to me is going to help anything?” He brushes past her to resume his pacing around the bed.

Toko swallows hard, trying to force the flushed, sweaty feeling out of her face. Dealing with Byakuya on the cusp of regressing is never easy, but it’s never been like this either. It’s like half of him wants to regress, while the other half is vehemently rejecting any sort of comfort.

Maybe he needs some alone time, to at least sort out what he wants. If Komaru has taught her one thing, she has better things to do than stand around and be someone else’s emotional punching bag. “I-if you’re going to be like this, I can just _leave_.”

“No!” And suddenly there are two hands fisted in the back of her shirt, clinging for dear life.

“B-Byakuya?” Toko rarely uses his first name, at least not without the proper honorifics, but nothing at this point feels right on her tongue. If anything, she needs to confirm to herself that this is actually Byakuya hanging onto her.

And just like that, the hands are gone.

“Don’t look at me,” he says. His voice is small, weak, so unlike him that Toko can’t help whirling.

Byakuya is perched on the edge of his bed, hunched over his knees, his head hanging low. From the crack in his voice, she’s sure that if she were to push aside that veil of hair, she’d find his eyes full of tears.

This is new. This is something she’s never seen from him before, and it’s absolutely terrifying.

She has to distance herself, imagine herself in the shoes of some hyper-capable female protagonist. If she were writing a scene like this, how would it go?

Well, she couldn’t fall into her old ruts, that’s for sure. If the male lead is acting out of sorts, so must his female counterpart. The walls they’ve set up, the codes in place, have to fall, if only a little bit.

If this scene were to incite the story’s low point before the climax, the female lead would either flip the script completely, going too far and putting them both out of their depth, or react as usual, giving him the opposite of what he needs. But if this breakdown _was_ the low point, if they were leading to the reconciliation, she’d do just enough to meet his emotional needs at the moment.

It was so much easier when she acted as the omniscient author, writing the emotions for both characters, instead of being hopelessly lost in the middle of a scene, trying to suss out by feel alone how far is too far.

“Wh-what’s wrong?” she asks. She dares taking a step forward, slipping her hand over his cheek. It’s only more concerning that he doesn’t flinch away, instead leaning into the touch.

“I don’t know.” Byakuya answers, sounding more lost than she’s ever heard him sound. All his bravado is meaningless in this moment. His tantrum could’ve been days ago for how far away it feels.

Her heart is pounding as she moves her thumb over the curve of his cheek. Is that too much? Not enough? How long until Byakuya snaps out of it and demands she leaves? She’s never initiated touch with him when he’s regressed before.

“How about I go get your p-paperwork?” Toko suggests.

“That sounds… good.” Byakuya says, voice stilted, eyes on the ground. Almost like he’s ashamed for not wanting her to take her hand away. But if that’s the truth, he doesn’t say it out loud.

Wedged between his desk and the wall is a simple manilla folder that contains his “paperwork.” Like everything about his regression, he uses a code. While Toko doesn’t like to put a name to anything, he does, just the wrong name. It’s a way to throw off suspicion, to keep people from drawing their own conclusions.

Toko opens the folder, selecting a page at random, and places it flat on his desk.

It’s another one of Byakuya’s rituals, to be able to sit at his desk, back straight and shoulders poised. He can never color anywhere else.

After a number of deep breaths, Byakuya sits up, lumbering his way over to his desk chair. His eyes rove over the page, his mouth caught halfway between relief and disgust.

Byakuya would never allow himself to print off a coloring page using the Hope’s Peak printers—it’s too much of a trail, and he still can’t shake the paranoia that someone is hovering over his shoulder, ready to find the smallest thing to take him down with—so Toko improvises.

Coloring and drawing calms her down too, but she’s never been that good at it, so most of the pages she makes are just random circles and squiggles. The most that she can manage is a bubble pattern, which she had to look up a tutorial for and Byakuya hated anyway. But still, she always finds the bubble sheet tucked in the very back of the “paperwork” folder, never shredded or burned like how most of his coloring sheets end up, so maybe he likes it more than he claims.

He gingerly plucks a red pen—no colored pencils, _absolutely_ no crayons. There would be no explaining that—and touches the tip to paper. His face is pinched, like the amount of work being asked of him is astronomical.

“I d-didn’t think your nephew was supposed to come today.” Toko pulls out the stool and sits beside him. It’s so short that, beside Byakuya, with his height and regularly sized chair, she has to tilt her head back to look at him. But it’s the seat she’s used to, and Byakuya likes reminders that he’s tall when he’s regressed.

“He wasn’t.” Byakuya murmurs. He’s only half-listening, already wrapped up in the monotony of coloring. The scratch of his pen makes its own quiet rhythm, adding a deliberateness to each stroke.

He’s smaller than usual, so Toko ventures a little further. “Did something happen?”

Byakuya pauses. “No. Nothing specific. Just the usual hazards of my schedule.”

Toko nods. That’s more than she expected to get, and she won’t test his patience with meaningless chatter. He’s always a little more open when he’s small, but that usually just amounts to non-committal half-answers instead of instant shutdowns.

“Please keep talking.” Byakuya says a moment later. “I’d prefer something to focus on.”

“Wh-what do you want me to talk about?” she asks. The comment he made about the “frivolities” she’d been spewing hangs in the back of her mind.

“What were you doing today? Before I pulled you from your work, of course.” If it were anyone else, she’d say he almost sounded apologetic.

So she tells him about her work, how some of the workers ended up finding a collection of papers salvaged from a fire. Many of the documents had to be shipped off elsewhere, or at least deemed not as important and thrown in the garbage, but she’s been working with a magnifying glass to see what she can put together between the scorch marks. It’s nothing compared to his work, which is like a behemoth of administration, finance, and PR, but he seems soothed hearing about it.

Toko peeks over the desk at his work. Sometimes, he’ll try to make something concrete out of her abstract doodles, but most times, like now, he’ll put his energy into making sure similar colors aren’t touching corners.

When he catches her looking, she offers him a smile. “It looks nice.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“F-fine, it looks like shit.”

Byakuya offers a little smile at that. “It does, doesn’t it?” He gives a little sigh, the tension falling out of his shoulders in centimeters. “Thank you. I appreciate you suggested paperwork as an alternative. It was a… clever solution.”

“I-I’m just glad I didn’t have to hit you.” Toko says. She thought her statement was perfectly innocuous, but something in Byakuya shifts. He sits up a little straighter—or at least tries to, because his posture is perfect.

Byakuya breathes in through his nose, his jaw hard like he’s biting back whatever remains of his pride. “Toko, I’m about to ask for something utterly ridiculous.”

“Okay…”

“May I rest my head on your shoulder? I believe the contact would… mean a lot right now.”

Usually he’d disguise a request like that. Something like “my nephew might like some personal contact” at the least. The fact that he can’t even muster that is telling.

“O-of course. Do you want me to—” She starts to move, but he’s already out of his seat.

“Where you are is fine.” To her surprise, he moves to the floor alongside her. His head slots into the curve of her shoulder naturally, like he’s meant to fit there.

The touch, no matter how little, activates all her senses in a way that could quickly get overwhelming, but she forces it down for his sake.

This is his time for comfort, and in turn her compromise. It’ll be paid back in time. Sometimes Toko desperately needs a hug, sometimes Byakuya desperately needs to be able to depend on someone else. Small exceptions to their own boundaries, sacrifices made in piecemeal.

Toko leans her head against his, careful not to put down too much pressure. The smell of his shampoo is duller than usual, like he hasn’t had the energy to keep his usual hygiene routine. Maybe that’s why everything became too much, why he needed a few hours in the quiet.

By evening, he’ll be back to his senses.

By evening, it’ll be like none of this ever happened. The distance between them will return, and Byakuya will never mention this. He may even deny it if she prompts him. And that’s all okay.

There are moments of vulnerability that don’t need to be solidified in words. They’re fleeting, turbulent storms that you simply have to wait out.

Toko is more than happy to be his port in the storm.

**Author's Note:**

> mcschnuggles.tumblr.com


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